How to Work with Excellence When Your Job Feels Like a Cosmic Joke

There’s a particular kind of slow-burn existential horror that sets in when you realize your job has no clear direction. It starts small—maybe your boss gives vague, contradictory instructions, maybe your team lurches from crisis to crisis like a pack of caffeinated toddlers, maybe you’re stuck in a meeting listening to a PowerPoint that, against all odds, contains zero actual information.

Then, one day, you wake up and realize you’ve been operating in a void of leadership and purpose for months, maybe years, and the only real skill you’ve developed is the ability to look busy while silently contemplating the choices that led you here.

I’ve been there. I have lived in that particular abyss where the rules are unwritten, the expectations are unspoken, and the people in charge are mysteriously absent whenever anything important needs deciding. And yet, against all odds, the work still has to get done.

So how do you keep pushing forward when everything in you is screaming that this entire situation is a broken simulation and you are merely a ghost pressing buttons? How do you work with excellence even when the deck is stacked against you?

1. Accept That No One Is Coming to Save You

First, let’s rip the Band-Aid off: no one is going to swoop in and fix this. No wise leader will descend from the heavens with a laminated handbook titled How to Do Your Job Because Your Boss is Useless.

This is the part where most people break—where they give in to the siren song of quiet quitting, where they let themselves drift into comfortable mediocrity, where they start replying to every email with “Sounds good” while mentally replaying their high school guidance counselor’s promise that they had so much potential.

But here’s the thing: this is where you get to decide what kind of person you actually are. You either become the kind of person who folds when leadership fails, or you become the kind of person who thrives in the chaos.

2. Create Structure Where None Exists

If your boss isn’t giving you clear direction, give yourself clear direction.

• Define success for yourself. If no one’s telling you what good work looks like, decide what good work looks like.

• Create your own workflows. Pretend you’re building a guide for the next poor soul who will take your job when you finally escape.

• Set your own deadlines. Do it not because anyone will notice, but because you refuse to become the kind of person who just drifts aimlessly.

You are, in effect, becoming your own boss while still collecting a paycheck from the actual boss who has checked out entirely.

3. Find the Hidden Meaning (Or, at the Very Least, Make It Up)

There’s a brutal kind of absurdity to doing work that no one appreciates or understands. It feels like being a character in a Kafka novel, endlessly stamping documents that exist solely to be stamped. If you’re not careful, this is where the existential dread wins.

So you have two options:

1. Let the meaninglessness crush you.

2. Impose meaning onto the work anyway.

Maybe you don’t care about the company’s bottom line, but you care about doing things well. Maybe your actual job is a joke, but you can find pride in making life easier for your coworkers. Maybe you’re surrounded by incompetence, but you can at least be the one person who isn’t phoning it in.

If you can’t find purpose, manufacture it like your sanity depends on it—because it kind of does.

4. Turn Frustration into a Secret Weapon

There is a kind of fire that builds in you when you work in dysfunction. A simmering, slow-burning frustration that, if directed properly, can fuel some of the best work you’ve ever done.

Because let’s be honest: some people will look at the chaos around them and say, “Welp, I guess this is just how things are.”

But you aren’t some people.

You can use that frustration as proof that you are capable of doing better. That you can thrive without hand-holding. That you can become the kind of person who doesn’t need constant guidance to do excellent work.

And if nothing else, channel that rage into something productive. Create systems. Streamline processes.

Do the work so well that when you finally escape, the company realizes too late that you were holding everything together.

5. Keep a List of Everything You’re Learning (Because You Won’t Be Here Forever)

There will be a day when this job is behind you. When you’re no longer dealing with bad leadership, confusing objectives, or that one coworker who has somehow never responded to an email in their entire life.

But the skills you’re developing now? Those are yours forever.

So start keeping track. Write down every lesson this job is teaching you. Because the irony of suffering through bad leadership is that, if you’re paying attention, you’re essentially getting a masterclass in what not to do—and that’s just as valuable as learning what to do.

6. Don’t Let This Place Turn You into a Lesser Version of Yourself

The real danger of working in dysfunction isn’t the stress. It’s not the confusion. It’s not even the bad management.

It’s what it does to you if you let it.

Because bad jobs have a way of eroding your character. They tempt you to lower your standards, to stop caring, to let excellence fade into bare-minimum survival mode.

And if you let that happen, the job wins.

But if you choose to keep working with integrity, even when no one is watching, even when no one is giving clear direction, even when it feels pointless—then you win.

Because at the end of the day, this job will just be a story you tell about that time you survived the absolute worst work environment known to man.

But the habits you build in the middle of the chaos? Those will shape who you are long after this place is a distant memory.